I began the first one – tentatively titled Dying Equestria in a nod to the Jack Vance novels – last summer. It’s set some millennia after the events of Friendship is Magic, long after that civilization is dead and gone. Basic idea was, in addition to ripping off paying homage to Vance, to get as far away from FIM while keeping things in the same universe. That fic got shelved, partly due to me going back to school, and partly because, although I have a setting and a protagonist, I’ve yet to find much of a plot.

The more recent one is showing more potential, and is in a sense the opposite. I’m currently calling it Rewrite of FIM, because that is more or less what it is: me taking the basic characters, setting and (to an extent) plots used in FIM and doing my own personal take on it. Completely new canon, completely new continuity, etc. I’m not sure as to how interesting FIM according to Josh W. will prove beyond being a fun writing exercise, but if it continues to pick up steam some of it will likely be inflicted upon you people.

Part of what makes writing fan fiction for FIM interesting, I find, is taking source material that is patently silly and treating it with a certain degree of gravitas. Also, I’ve been meaning to hone my fiction writing skills, which have only recently reached a level that I find somewhat passable.* But I find it way more intimidating than firing off opinions here, and writing about ponies takes the edge off of that a bit.

*To date, I am responsible for three novellas, two of which I have obliterated from the face of the earth due to them being so embarrassing to me that I cannot take the risk of leaving them to posterity. The third one may also be in that league, but I have yet to revisit it. Two of them date from the period of my life where I was heavily enamored with modernist/pomo fiction but did not have much of a developed point of view, the result being a turgid mix of bad magical realism and bad experimental prose. The third is just bad SF. In the fall of 2012, I wrote the first few chapters of a murder mystery for NaNoWriMo, and they are the first substantial body of fiction written by me that I look upon with approval.